Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi

Essam Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi (1959-), also known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, was a Jordanian-Palestinian imam and the spiritual mentor of al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Biography
Essam Muhammad Tahir al-Barqawi was born in 1959 in Nablus, West Bank while the region was occupied by Jordan, and his family moved to Kuwait and then Iraq while he was young. al-Barqawi studied at the University of Mosul in Iraq and began to subscribe to Islamism, studying Hanbalism and scholars such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Qayyim. While he was in Medina, Saudi Arabia, he was influenced by Wahhabism, and he met jihad groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. From 1995 to 1999, he was imprisoned with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi for their terrorist views, and he decided to stay in Jordan after his release, while Zarqawi went to Afghanistan. While al-Maqdisi hated the West and told fighters not to support the Western government of Yemen during the Yemeni Civil War, al-Maqdisi asked for the Islamic State to release aid worker Alan Henning rather than execute him, and he was opposed to ISIS' radical ideology.